Archive for April, 2008



Pray-in at S.F. gas station asks God to lower prices

From SFGate:

 Rocky Twyman has a radical solution for surging gasoline prices: prayer.

 

Twyman - a community organizer, church choir director and public relations consultant from the Washington, D.C., suburbs - staged a pray-in at a San Francisco Chevron station on Friday, asking God for cheaper gas. He did the same thing in the nation’s Capitol on Wednesday, with volunteers from a soup kitchen joining in. Today he will lead members of an Oakland church in prayer.

 

Yes, it’s come to that.

 

“God is the only one we can turn to at this point,” said Twyman, 59. “Our leaders don’t seem to be able to do anything about it. The prices keep soaring and soaring.”

 

Gas prices have been driven relentlessly higher this year by the bull market for crude oil, gasoline’s main ingredient. A gallon of regular now costs $3.89, on average, in California, while the national average has hit $3.58.

 

To solve the problem, Twyman isn’t begging the Lord for any specific act of intervention. He is not asking God to make OPEC pump more oil. Nor is he praying for all the speculative investors to be purged from the New York Mercantile Exchange, where crude oil is traded.

 

Instead, he says anyone who wants to follow his example should keep it simple.

 

“God, deliver us from these high gas prices,” Twyman said. “That’s all they have to say.”

 

Consumer advocates who have been howling about gasoline prices for months say they understand his frustration, even if they haven’t tried his tactics.

 

“Given the complete inertia and silence of this White House on a crisis that has people feeling just hopeless, prayer is probably as good as anything,” said Judy Dugan, research director with the nonprofit group Consumer Watchdog. “Frankly, I wish them luck.”

 

Article Continues @ Sourced Site

Follow Up: Pentagon Halts Controversial Links to Military Pundits

From Editor and Publisher:

NEW YORK The Pentagon has temporarily stopped giving Defense Department information to retired military officers pending a review of their questioned objectivity, according to Stars & Stripes.

The independent military paper reported Friday that Robert Hastings, principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, said the practice had been ended for now. The move comes days after The New York Times first reported that the Pentagon had been feeding information to retired officers who appeared on various media outlets to discuss the Iraq War, often using them to lend credibility to key decisions.

“Some of these retired officers saw their access to key decision-makers as possible business opportunities for the defense contractors they represent,” Stars & Stripes reported. “The [Times] story also alleged that the officers who did not repeat the Bush administration’s official line were denied further access to information.”

Hastings told Stars & Stripes he was concerned about the allegations that the Defense Department’s relationship with the retired military analysts was improper.

 

Article Continues @ Sourced Site

Peak Coal as Early as 2025

From Clean Technica:

With dwindling fossil fuel supplies, coal has been viewed as the energy source of last resort. This outlook is changing as estimated global coal supplies seem to have been severely inflated. Is coal’s future in doubt?

Many experts are saying yes. Professor David Rutledge of CalTech believes that world coal reserves are grossly overstated and could be substantially exhausted this century. This is in stark contrast to earlier forecasts.

Coal Reserves InflatedIn the last 20 years, official coal reserves have fallen by 170 billion tons. To put this number in perspective, global coal consumption in 2007 was 6 billion tons. Reserves figures are dropping far more quickly than actual extraction.

The European Commission’s Institute for Energy in 2000 estimated global supplies of coal to last 277 years. In 2007, that number was lowered to 155 years.

This forecast may sound like plenty of time to adjust to meeting our energy needs in from other sources, but how accurate are these numbers really? The National Academy of Sciences Report on Coal, from June 2007 isn’t very encouraging.

“Present estimates of coal reserves are based upon methods that have not been reviewed or revised since their inception in 1974, and much of the input data were compiled in the early 1970’s. Recent programs to assess reserves in limited areas using updated methods indicate that only a small fraction of previously estimated reserves are actually minable reserves.”

To make matters worse, some countries, such as Vietnam and China have not changed their official reserves figures for decades. This seems suspicious because billions of tons of coal have been mined during this period.

New Coal Discoveries Unlikely

Article Continues @ Sourced Site

Joint Chiefs chair: US prepping military options against Iran

From Rawstory:

 Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the Pentagon is planning “potential” military actions against Iran, reports The Washington Post.

 

Mullen criticized Iran’s “‘increasingly lethal and malign influence’ in Iraq,” writes Ann Scott Tyson for the Post.

 

Addressing concerns about the US military’s capability of dealing with yet another conflict at a time when forces are purportedly stretched thin, Mullen said war with Iran “would be ‘extremely stressing’ but not impossible for U.S. forces, pointing specifically to reserve capabilities in the Navy and Air Force,” Tyson notes.

 

“It would be a mistake to think that we are out of combat capability,” she quotes the U.S.’s top military leader at a Pentagon news conference.

 

Mullen’s assertion comes a day after American forces reportedly fired warning shots at Iranian speedboats in the Persian Gulf, a confrontation that Iran denies took place.

 

prior incident involving U.S. forces in the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian speedboats in January of this year–which Republican White House candidates used (with the notable exception of Ron Paul) as a saber-rattling opportunity during a nationally-televised debate–was later discredited as a virtual fabrication.

 

Excerpts from the Post article, available in full here, follow…

 

Article Continues @ Source Site

McCain Blows by Public Spending Cap

From The Washington Post:

 Sen. John McCain has officially broken the limits imposed by the presidential public financing system, reports filed last night show.

 

McCain has now spent $58.4 million on his primary effort. Those who have committed to public financing can spend no more than $54 million on their primary bid.

 

So has McCain broken the law? The answer is far from simple.

 

It depends on whether he has, in fact, withdrawn from the public matching program. McCain was certified to enter the matching program last year when he was starved for cash. But once he started to win primaries, he decided to step back from it. On Feb. 6, after his Super Tuesday victories, he wrote to the FEC to announce he would withdraw from the program.

 

McCain’s lawyers said that gave him freedom to spend as much as he wanted — once he announced his intent to withdraw from the system, they say, he was released from the spending caps.

 

But Federal Election Commission Chairman David Mason wrote McCain’s campaign last month to alert him that the commission had not yet granted his Feb. 6 request to withdraw, and that the commission would first need to vote on the matter. A snag: The FEC has four vacancies and therefore lacks a quorum to consider the matter.

 

There’s little agreement on what the FEC would have done, had they been able to meet. In part, that’s because McCain borrowed $4 million from a commercial bank, and promised to pay the money back through his fundraising efforts. If the campaign went badly, he told the bank, he would use future matching funds to help repay the loan. The rules say that candidates who use matching funds as collateral have to remain within the confines of the system. The Democratic National Committee filed a complaint to the FEC about McCain’s actions, but without that quorum, evaluation of the complaint has been stalled.

 

 Article Continues @ Sourced Site

 

Groundbreaking New Book Documents Widespread Election Fraud

by Jason Leopold

http://www.opednews.com

Earlier this month, at a conference in San Francisco, several renowned computer scientists warned that electronic voting machines remain vulnerable to computer hackers due to serious security flaws in the operating software, calling into question the integrity of a presidential election that is still seven months away, and all other elections in the U.S. where paper ballots have been replaced by these paperless electronic machines.

There wasn’t anything particularly new in the scientists’ revelations other than the fact that the magazine PC World covered the issue and several other mainstream news organizations.

Arguably, any mainstream coverage these days of election fraud, a topic of such national significance that it literally affects anyone who has ever cast a ballot, can be credited to a handful of hard core voting rights activists and muckraking citizen journalists who have made it their life’s mission to overhaul the way people vote and restore much needed integrity to the process.

The scientists’ warnings that this year’s historic presidential election can be tinkered with came on the heels of the publication of a groundbreaking new book, “Loser Take All,” click here a collection of eye-opening investigative reports into past issues of election fraud authored by voting rights experts, activists, and journalists, who used old-fashioned gumshoe reporting to expose the seedy side of the business of counting votes.

Unlike the reportage leading up the invasion of Iraq, which relied heavily on anonymous sources who spoon fed mainstream reporters wild tales of Iraq’s vast weapons cache, lapped up by Pulitzer Prize winning journalists and printed as fact, the reports about stolen elections, the massive purge of minorities and poor people from voter rolls, in “Loser Take All” is backed up by smoking gun evidence in the form of documents and on the record accounts from public officials and behind-the-scenes executives employed by e-voting companies.

Perhaps no one has been passionate about this issue or has worked as hard to attract mainstream attention to the cause than bestselling author Mark Crispin Miller and blogger Brad Friedman, who co-authored an essay for the book with voting rights advocate Michael Richardson.

Well before anyone understood what election fraud meant, Miller, also a professor at New York University, and Friedman, whose BradBlog website is the go-to place on the Internet for comprehensive coverage on voting issues, were sounding early warning alarms and educating the public about voting machines plagued with software bugs, the ease at which hackers can bust into the system and change the vote count for candidates, such as George W. Bush, and place him ahead of Democratic challenger John Kerry in states such as Ohio.

Miller, who wrote extensively in his book “Fooled Again” click here about the theft of countless votes cast during the 2004 presidential election–in Ohio and many other states– were stolen from Kerry and handed to Bush, said in an interview that the 2008 election can be stolen “through pre-emption of innumerable votes, as well as through the use of e-voting machines, both paperless touch-screen machines and op-scans.”

“It’s safe to say that the entire federal government, insofar as it’s controlled by BushCo’s appointees, has been diligently working to suppress all but those votes that will support the [Republican] party,” Miller said. “The [Veterans Administration], for example, has announced that it will not help badly injured veterans register to vote since those who’ve been thus damaged by Bush/Cheney’s war aren’t likely to be big McCain supporters.” MORE

Rush Limbaugh Calling For Riots In Denver

From ABC-7 (Denver)

DENVER — Talk show host Rush Limbaugh is sparking controversy again after he made comments calling for riots in Denver during the Democratic National Convention this summer.

He said the riots would ensure a Democrat is not elected as president, and his listeners have a responsibility to make sure it happens.

“Riots in Denver, the Democrat Convention would see to it that we don’t elect Democrats,” Limbaugh said during Wednesday’s radio broadcast. He then went on to say that’s the best thing that could happen to the country.

Article Continues @ Sourced Site.

New home sales plunge to lowest level in 16 1/2 years; Prices drop at rate unseen in almost 4 decades

By MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer

WASHINGTON - Sales of new homes plunged in March to the lowest level in 16 1/2 years as housing slumped further at the start of the spring sales season. The median price of a new home in March compared to a year ago fell by the largest amount in nearly four decades.

The Commerce Department reported Thursday that sales of new homes dropped by 8.5 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 526,000 units, the slowest sales pace since October 1991.

The median price of a home sold in March dropped by 13.3 percent compared to March 2007, the biggest year-over-year price decline since a 14.6 percent plunge in July 1970.

For March, sales were down in all regions of the country, dropping the most in the Northeast, a decline of 19.4 percent. Sales fell by 12.9 percent in the Midwest, 12.5 percent in the Midwest and 4.6 percent in the South. More

Medical Experts Tell Congress Abstinence Programs Don’t Work

By Will Dunham, Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Programs teaching U.S. schoolchildren to abstain from sex have not cut teen pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases or delayed the age at which sex begins, health groups told Congress on Wednesday.

The Bush administration, however, voiced continuing support for such programs during a hearing before a House of Representatives panel even as many Democrats called for cutting off federal money for so-called abstinence-only instruction.

These programs, backed by many social conservatives who oppose the teaching of contraception methods to teenagers in schools, have received about $1.3 billion in federal funds since the late 1990s. Currently, 17 of the 50 U.S. states refuse to accept federal funds for such programs.

Experts from the American Public Health Association and U.S. Institute of Medicine testified that scientific studies have not found that abstinence-only teaching works to cut pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases or the age when sexual activity begins.

The American Psychological Association and American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists also issued statements to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform criticizing the abstinence-only programs.

Lawmakers cited government statistics showing that one in four U.S. teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease and 30 percent of U.S. girls become pregnant before the age of 20.

Republicans said even if some abstinence-only programs do not work, others do, and it would be wrong to end the funding. More

Durable goods orders fall for third straight month

By MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer

WASHINGTON - Orders to factories for big-ticket manufactured goods fell for a third straight month in March, the longest string of declines since the 2001 recession.

The Commerce Department said Thursday that demand for durable goods dropped by 0.3 percent last month, a worse-than-expected performance that underscored the problems manufacturers are facing from a severe economic slowdown. The last time orders fell for three consecutive months was from February to April of 2001, when the country was sliding into the last recession.

President Bush on Tuesday said the economy was not in a recession but a period of slower growth. However, economists who believe the country has fallen into a recession will point to the string of declines in manufacturing orders to support their view.

The weakness in manufacturing orders was led by a 4.6 percent drop in orders for autos, a sector that has been hard hit by soaring gasoline prices and the weakening economy, which have cut sharply into car sales. Orders in the category that includes home appliances fell by 6.6 percent. This industry has been hurt by the two-year slump in home sales.

Consumer sentiment has plunged to recessionary lows as Americans have also watched gasoline prices soar to an average price above $3.50 per gallon nationally.

The 0.3 percent drop in orders for durable goods, items expected to last at least three years, followed even bigger declines of 0.9 percent in February and 4.4 percent in January. More




  • Support The H.O.R.N.

    Monthly Subscriptions
    Rock ($10 USD)
    Paper ($25 USD)
    Scissors ($50 USD)
    Hammer! ($100 USD)
  • To donate by mail

On Air!



Streaming and Archives made possible by
The White Rose Society

Chatroom


  • One Billion Bulbs The Head On Radio Network Bulbs Change Statistics

  • H.O.R.N. Widgets




  • Subscribe

    Subscribe to my RSS Feeds

    Categories


    Close
    E-mail It